All White with Marco

We are sitting in Drones, Marco Pierre White's Pont Street restaurant, to discuss a new business venture - a foray into the world of private dining clubs. But Marco sets the mood, Marco sets the agenda and Marco talks about what he wants to talk about. He's also, like Margaret Thatcher, virtually impossible to interrupt. Today he doesn't want to talk about cooking or business, he wants to tell his story.

He was, of course, an indisputedly great chef-the youngest and the first Brit to be awarded three Michelin stars. But he cooked his last meal for paying customers on 23 December 1999. 'I had three options. I could continue to be a prisoner of the world I'd created (in the kitchen 12 hours a day, six days a week). I could live a lie, like most chefs, and pretend to be in the kitchen, but I think that's an injustice. My third choice was to let go of status, to give back three stars, to reinvent myself.'

And that, with enormous success, is what he's done. Marco is at the helm of a restaurant empire often valued at £50 million. Though he's not in the mood for boasting ('Who says I've made any money?'), over the years he has changed Londoners' expectations of gastronomy with his ' neighbourhood' restaurants which include Drones, the Belvedere, Chez Max, Mirabelle and L'Escargot.

He's a physically intimidating figure at 6ft 4in, with the weathered features of a poacher. 'Have I been intimidating so far?' he asks, before launching into unexpectedly evangelical prose. 'You have to understand that a person does not have the power to intimidate someone else, you can only intimidate yourself. Just as nobody has the power to manipulate you - you manipulate yourself - and nobody can make you fall in love, you choose to.'

Certainly, today's more mellow Marco is all about self-discovery, through which, he says, lies true success. And yet this calm, philosophical man grew out of years of fury and early trauma.

It is well documented that the enfant terrible grew up on a council estate in Leeds. 'Oh, the world I came from is nothing like the world of today' - his grand, gruff northern tones make him sound older than 41 - 'there was no graffiti, no drugs, just a sense of community among proper working-class people who unfortunately don't exist any more.'

Marco Pierre was the only one of four sons to be named by their Italian mother, Maria Rosa, who died of a brain haemorrhage when he was six. His three brothers were called Graham, Clive and Craig, so you can imagine the victimisation of one with so exotic a name. 'Of course I was bullied, of course I was provoked and I was very alone,' he says, visibly upset but determined to continue. 'I want to share my story - I find it easy to tell my story.' Well, it doesn't look easy, it looks rather painful. 'When bullying happens,' he continues, 'you can either deal with it or you can allow it to continue. I dealt with it. I began to live the life of someone I wasn't - being very tough, being very hard, being very bullish.' And so began the pattern which formed the next 25 years of his life.

This cycle of forceful and frightening behaviour contributed vastly to his notoriety. 'The enfant terrible thing happened because the emotional investment I made in my work was so enormous - like the investment you put into a boyfriend. Your boyfriend does something slightly wrong and you overreact. I had that relationship with my work. Second, the emotional confusion as a result of not dealing with my mother's death was magnifying - I was so exposed to my insecurities. Then, when I was 31, I stopped and asked myself about my mother,' he says, 'and I thought it an illogical approach to ask my aunts or uncle or my father. They would only have told me what I wanted to hear. My logic dictated that I should write down every memory I had of her. I dealt with it by mathematics and, by the end of it, I started to realise who I was and that I was a product of my mother - and not my father - even though he had programmed me to be a certain way.'

As a result, he is determined to allow his own children to grow up feeling free. 'I want them to be themselves, to be good boys and nice to the people around them.' He has four children, two girls Laetitia and Mirabelle, and two boys, Luciano and Marco, but it's always 'my boys'. He often takes them pike fishing and shooting and seems impressed by the grandeur and ceremony of country pursuits, yet has no country home, which seems odd. 'Oh, I just love getting dressed up in warm clothes and driving down the motorway. It's fabulous seeing my boys with furry hats on!' And does he cook with the children? 'Oh, now and then,' he says dismissively. I forgot that we weren't here to talk about cooking.

His twenties were extremely unhappy but the press and, of course, the customers, loved it. He put sex into the kitchen. He's no oil painting, but he's reputed across London society to be tremendously attractive. One blonde confessed: 'Whenever I see him he's fiddling with something - a glass, a cigarette - doesn't matter, I always wish it were me.'

He says that when he started in the late Seventies, only the working classes and immigrants went into the restaurant business. 'But I made it rather rock'n'roll,' he says, just as Guy Ritchie pops over to have a chat from a neighbouring table. 'What differentiated me from a lot of chefs was that I went out with society, I was in the gossip columns.'

Urban myth firmly states that he was a voracious and successful womaniser but now he is happily married to Mati, the Spanish mother of three of his four children. At one point she pops in to say hello, he sees her across the room and mutters, 'Glamorous woman is Mati,' sounding both admiring and rather Last of the Summer Wine. Apparently, Antony Worrall Thompson was responsible for their union. 'He's a nice man is Antony, he's a good boy is Antony, he's intelligent and that's why a lot of chefs don't like him [Worrall Thompson has recently been involved in a spat in print with Gordon Ramsay, who has accused him of being chippy] 'cos he's articulate and educated and rather than just shut the f*** up and listen to the guy and maybe learn something, they just resent him. They don't come much better than Antony.'

Anyway, it turns out that Worrall Thompson had been chasing Mati for months when she got a job behind the bar of Marco's restaurant, the Canteen in Chelsea Harbour, 'He'd been talking about this beautiful girl,' remembers Marco, 'and when he came in to the Canteen I put two and two together and I felt rather envious. I didn't want someone else chatting up my staff.'

Mati's story shows Marco to be a little more skittish. 'He was infuriating,' she says. 'He kept flicking matches into the drinks I was trying to mix. When I finally confronted him and asked him why he was being so irritating, he said, "It's so you'll think about me when I'm not here."' She is very direct, open, rather exotic with huge brown eyes like a foxy au pair. He talks much of his epiphany regarding his mother's death, but it's worth noting that he met Mati at about the same time he felt able to grow up, so perhaps she deserves some credit.

This is his third marriage, his first was to the mother of his elder daughter, Laetitia, and he never talks about her. 'Nice girl, lovely girl, good mother,' is as far as he will be drawn. About his second wife, model Lisa Butcher to whom he was married for 15 weeks, he is far less loyal and far more vocal. But he is very settled now. 'People look at individuals with failed marriages and see it as a sign of failure,' he tells me. 'Actually, I admire people who've been through a couple of marriages because it shows that they are in search of love. And if you have to go through five weddings before you find the person you are happy with, then that's the price you have to pay. Worth it in the end.'

But he's not ready to move into his dotage just yet - it's time to try something new, 'to roll the dice again, to take another risk', so he's entered into a new project with one of his best friends, Piers Adam of nightclub fame.

Drones Club is a private dining club in Mayfair, which is interesting to Marco since 'a lot of our friends dine at home because of who they are'. He explains: 'When they go to a restaurant, it is not guaranteed that they will be protected. And the Drones Club is a fabulous name and an under-used brand.'

Drones is the fictional club used by Wodehouse's creation Bertie Wooster, and Drones Pont Street was a favourite of the SW set long before Marco reinvented it. The committee, a closely guarded secret, is being put together from London society and the international movie crowd. It is also the first time Marco has created an Italian menu - until now he has always stuck to French food with perhaps a bit of English thrown in. 'It makes sense,' says Adam. 'He's such an exciting character that he absolutely should do something Italian and mad.' He adds: 'If people think he's exhausting, imagine what it must be like to live with that talent.'

No wonder Marco craves the odd bit of solitude. 'Last week I sat on a high chair in a field waiting for a deer for three hours. I didn't see a deer but that's not the point, I saw other things. You see, a clear conscience is true strength,' he says, 'and the people in control are the ones who are open and honest. If you can't be honest with me then you are on very shaky ground. And I can always tell. Now, have another glass of champagne - nothing's going to make me look worse than sitting opposite a bird with an empty glass.' Well, if you put it like that...